The use of optical fibers or groups of optical fibers attached to different types of light sources to illuminate areas having limited accessibility and lacking a clear line of sight with an external light source is well known in the art. Use in medical applications is sometimes limited by the buildup of excess temperature at the distal or light emitting end of the optical fiber. This is particularly limiting in the case of plastic optical fibers. This is at least partly due to the inherent inefficiency of typical optical fibers to deliver light at specific target areas and the increased emission of light from the attached light source required to provide adequate illumination to a surgical site.
At the proximal end of the optical fiber, current fiber optic illumination systems require an optical fiber with a relatively large diameter and/or a relatively large Numerical Aperture to collect an adequate amount of the typically highly divergent light from an attached light source.
Further, at the distal end, current fiber optic illumination systems suffer from excess light scattered outside the target area due to an inability to emit the high order mode light collected at the proximal end and distribute it at the distal end as low order mode light. Existing fiber optic illumination systems require a relatively large diameter fiber to deliver similar light intensities on a relatively small target area.
What is clearly needed, therefore, is a fiber optic illumination system allowing a relatively small diameter optical fiber to collect high order mode light at the proximal end, transmit the light along the length of the optical fiber, and distribute lower order mode light at the distal end.